Colour
PAINTING EXHIBITION
Helena da Conceição Filipe Mendes
22 nd of March / Casa Família Oliveira Guimarães, Espinhal / 3.30 p.m.
Vincent van Gogh (1830–1890); Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944); Kasimir Malevich (1879-1935); Paul Klee (1879–1940); Juan Miró (1893-1983); Pablo Picasso (1881-1973); Antoine Mortier (1908-1999); Henry Michaux (1899-1984); David Hockney (1937); Maria de Lurdes Rodrigues (1957); José de Guimarães (1939).
(...) When I attended the Free Painting Courses at Cooperativa Árvore, in Porto, I brought home several painting catalogues (from exhibitions I went to), as well as painting books, purchased from second-hand bookstores and bookshops (...). We talked about what we saw, and I mean a lively dialogue, that is, a fraternal dialogic coexistence, around the painting. Through this means, my mother had access to the works of the most significant painters in the history of art, from different eras, and became interested in many painters. Her taste was especially towards modernist painters (abstractionists, expressionists, suprematists, and a little towards the surrealists).
(...) There is, however, a common denominator to highlight: all the painters that my mother chose of her own free will, that is, arbitrarily, are free, sovereign souls, just as, by the way, my mother was and is.
(...) I would like to remind you that the works featured in this exhibition are reproductions of paintings by the artists duly cited in the opening of this text. They were made with a certain freedom, but mainly with refined criteria and rigor. Likewise, the works on display were not created with the intention of being exhibited, but rather as part of an existential process. Perhaps for this reason they now remain existing and alive despite being exposed. (...) The works were chosen gently and naturally, independently, with soul, in the same way that one chooses a flower from the field.
(...) I think that my mother painted and paints, to be... “or at least to become an individual” as Paul Klee so aptly said when reflecting on the intention of art. Paul Klee made the following reflection: “Art does not reproduce what we see, it makes us see.” It was this desire to individualize oneself and to see that guided my mother in the act of painting.
João Filipe Mendes, in COR - Pintar de Cor, Exposição de Pintura: Helena da Conceição Filipe Mendes
Helena da Conceição Filipe Mendes is a self-taught painter aged 82. She had her first contact with the arts very early on, intuitively and freely, and later with machine embroidery, fabric painting and finally oil painting.
“A neighbour used to make coloured chalk in a shed. I would climb over the wall and go and paint with two boys my age with chalk. We would paint the walls of the shed, freely, for hours on end. (...) I felt it was something natural, the work flowed, there were no rules, I combined colours intuitively.” Helena Filipe Mendes